Earthly Branch · Yín
Yín (寅)
the first stir of spring — rising Wood carrying the spark of Fire, sudden initiative
- Zodiac correspondence:
- Tiger
- Element:
- Wood
- Season:
- early spring
- Hours:
- 03:00–05:00
- Lunar month:
- the 1st lunar month
- Hidden stems:
- Yang Wood (甲) · Yang Fire (丙) · Yang Earth (戊)
The third Earthly Branch — early spring, rising Wood with a spark of Fire. Its zodiac animal is the Tiger.
Overview
Yin (寅) is the third Earthly Branch, and the rule still holds: Yin is the branch; the Tiger is the popular Chinese-zodiac animal that corresponds to it. Yin is not 'the Tiger' — it is Yin, a calendrical unit, with the Tiger as its familiar label.
As a branch, Yin is the first real stir of spring — the 1st lunar month, the dark hours just before dawn when the year's growth begins to move. Its element is Wood, but a Wood already warmed by a hidden spark of Fire: the surge of initiative, the new season breaking ground. It is one of the four 'growth-opening' branches that start a season.
As a unit of time
As time, Yin rules 03:00–05:00 (the 寅時 double-hour), the 1st lunar month at spring's opening, and an east-northeast position. The pillar it sits in fixes which layer of the chart its early-spring surge colours.
Hidden stems (藏干)
Yin's hidden stems (藏干) are Yang Wood (甲) as the main qi, with Yang Fire (丙) and Yang Earth (戊). The buried Fire is why Yin is not cold sprouting Wood but warm, rising, kindling Wood — growth with momentum already in it. The hidden stems carry that latent Fire and Earth inside the branch.
Clashes, trinities, combinations
Yin's clash (六沖) is with Shen (申, the Monkey) — the Wood-against-Metal, spring-against-autumn axis. It opens the Fire trinity (三合) 寅午戌 (Yin–Wu–Xu), and its six-combination (六合) is with Hai (亥, the Pig), the pair combining toward Wood. These are structural relationships between chart positions, not predictions.
Cross-system reference
| System | Closest archetype | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Zi Wei Dou Shu | One of the twelve fixed cells of a Zi Wei chart — the 寅 position a palace sits on | In Zi Wei the twelve Earthly Branches are the chart's twelve fixed cells: every palace occupies a branch, and a chart's 命宮 (Life Palace) can land on 寅. Its Bazi clash partner 申 (Monkey) sits in the cell directly opposite — what Zi Wei reads as the 對宮 (opposite palace) on the same axis. Same twelve branches, used as the spatial frame for the palaces, not as a Bazi pillar. |
| Chinese zodiac (生肖) | The Tiger — the popular animal label for the branch Yin | The Tiger is the everyday zodiac's name for Yin; the branch Yin — its Wood element, hidden Fire, time and interactions — is the technical unit a Bazi chart actually reads. |
| Western astrology | A loose structural parallel only — twelve divisions of a cycle | No sign maps to a branch; the branches are calendrical, not personality signs. The only parallel is the shared twelve-fold division. |
The Chinese zodiac animal is a popular label for the branch, not the branch itself, and there is no branch-to-Western-sign mapping. Cross-system anchors are a loose heuristic; an Earthly Branch is a calendrical unit with hidden stems, which neither the zodiac nor Western astrology shares.
Reading this descriptively
Yin describes a position in time and its elemental character — early-spring rising Wood — not a personality, not a destiny, and not 'you are a Tiger'. It is read against the rest of the chart, and the same branch plays out very differently across different lives.
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